It Didn’t Have to Be Like This

When President Donald Trump took office in 2017, he pointed to “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” and vowed to end this “American carnage.” From now on, he said, “every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families.” And he made a promise: “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”

More than three years later, tens of millions of the Americans Trump promised not to forget are out of work, many of them relying on charities to feed their family. In the second week of April, more than 10,000 families lined up in their cars in San Antonio, Texas, waiting for food assistance. The city’s food bank and food pantries are under increasing strain. The number of people who need help is rising with the rise in unemployment, and many of those who are still employed are seeing their pay cut along with their hours.

“We've responded to hurricanes that have hit the Gulf Coast,” Michael Guerra, the chief development officer for the San Antonio Food Bank, told me. But they pale in comparison to the current challenge, he said, with the need stretching on for months. It’s “not even close.”

As I interviewed dozens of San Antonians at the food bank’s distribution center at the Alamodome in mid-April, a few things stood out. Very few had needed food assistance before the coronavirus outbreak. The unemployment rate in the area had rocketed to 13.7 percent that month, according to the Texas Workforce Commission, but that number didn’t account for all the people who remained employed but had had their hours reduced. Most of the people I spoke with remained employed in what would have been gainful work—among them were mechanics, customer-service workers, home-care aides, and food-service workers—but whether they had lost their jobs or just had their hours cut, they needed help now because they had never been able to save much money. Almost everyone I spoke with who was employed had been treading water since the Great Recession of 2008 and the painfully slow recovery that followed.

[Annie Lowrey: As usual, Americans must go it alone]

Before the coronavirus outbreak, Guerra estimated, the San Antonio Food Bank was feeding about 60,000 individuals a week. During the outbreak, he told me, that number went as high as 180,000, but now seems to have settled at around 120,000. “Seventy percent of the people who were gonna be in these distribution lines had never gotten food from the food bank before,” he said. “These are people who lost their work, lost their income. They didn't have the ability for financial savings along the way. They were